The morning is new! Why make it old by the rehearsal of yesterday's rants? The morning is alive! Why mortify it by the re-animation of useless memories?
So I admonish myself, to little effect.
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A New Morning
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Stripes Urgent Care
On the wall: "By his stripes you shall be made whole." Isaiah 53:5
Curious. I had the good sense not to query the sweet young receptionist about the inscription: Is bloodletting practiced here?
2 responses to “Stripes Urgent Care”
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Unseen Warfare
Because unseen, easy to doubt, dismiss, deny. At your own risk.
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RFK Jr. on WWIII
Pay attention to his endorsement of DJT. I am assuming you want to live a few years longer.
For historical context, listen to JFK's 22 October 1962 address to the nation on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I shudder to think what might have happened if any of the following had been in charge in those dark days: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden. Kamala Harris is worse than all of them put together. Vote wisely. It is not just our republic that hangs by a thread.
Legend has it that Dylan penned Hard Rain during (and because of the events of) those days. I remember them well and still have the newspaper clippings from the hometown rag, The Post Advocate.
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Anti-Bukowski
Aim high, do try. You won't reach what youthful fatuity fancied, but you will get farther than you would have got without the high shot.
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More Proof of Leftist Scumbaggery
4 responses to “More Proof of Leftist Scumbaggery”
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The Journals of John Cheever
Arrived yesterday. I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this. Prager wrote one. Podhoretz wrote one.
Cheever lets it all hang out with brutal honesty. Auto-paralysis through self-analysis on the rocks of self-loathing. I open at random to p. 96:
I am a solitary drunkard. I take a little painkiller before lunch but I really don't get to work until late afternoon. At four or half past four or sometimes five I stir up a Martini, thinking that a great many men who can't write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at bar stools. [. . .]
He's thinking about Kerouac, I'll guess. The entry is dated 1957, the year On the Road was published. Two pages later, Cheever lays into Jack in a long entry which begins, "My first feelings about Kerouac's book were: that it was not good . . . ."
Who is the better writer? Cheever. Who cuts closer to the bone of life and left more of a cultural mark (for good or ill)? Kerouac.
Too much of the preciosity of the Eastern Establishment attaches to such superb literary craftsmen as Cheever, Updike, and Yates, phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such. Social climbers like Cheever look down on regional writers such as Edward Abbey, whose journal is entitled Confessions of a Barbarian.
I read 'em all, even boozer Bukowski whose novels I consider trash. Some of his poetry, though, I think is good; Bluebird for example.
4 responses to “The Journals of John Cheever”
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Why Do Men Arise So Early?
I am the king of the early risers. No one beats me out of the sack. I get up so early I can't decide whether I'm an early bird or a night owl. But I'm avis rara for sure.
You may also enjoy my latest Substack upload, Rise and Shine with Manny.
7 responses to “Why Do Men Arise So Early?”
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Rights and Needs
You can have a right to a thing whether or not you have or will have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a gun?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one."
Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.
Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Leftists need to be defeated not debated.
Vote, vote early, and vote against the tyrants and the projectionist liars and language abusers of the Kamalist Left. I am assuming that you understand what is in your own long-term best self-interest. Go to GunVote.org to register.
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No Complacency! All Hands on Deck!
The Republic hangs by a thread. We must defeat the Kamalists* and do so decisively. They need not just defeat but demoralization. Unfortunately, too many 'influencers' are predicting a Trump victory. Not wise. We must not wax complacent. Our political enemies will do anything to win. No moral or legal considerations constrain them. We know a priori (in Kant's relative sense of the term) that they will cheat their posteriors off — get the pun? –and then lie their heads off about their cheating. Why shouldn't they lie and cheat? We let them get away with it. Like Bret Baier, we conservatives are hobbled by our virtues, our civility for example.
Roger Kimball the other day, and now Piers Morgan may be doing more harm than good.
Morgan:
“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”
I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.
As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.
First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.
This is quite extraordinary given how specific she has been, with her campaign team stating that she worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 after her freshman year at Howard University, working on the cash register, french fries station and ice cream machine.
Read it all.
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*My astute readers of course know not to confuse Kamalism (a coinage I borrow from Thomas Klingenstein) and Kemalism.
7 responses to “No Complacency! All Hands on Deck!”
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Who Says You Can’t Go Home Again?
A Substack tribute to "Sweet Gone Jack" 55 years gone.
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The Daily Beat
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Misremembering Kerouac
An article from The Guardian.
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Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?
Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter. A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience. We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both in the mode of sentience and in the object-directed mode as when we are conscious of this or that. The philosophers' term of art for this object-directed type of consciousness is intentionality. A special case of object-directed consciousness is knowledge of things and states of affairs. Beyond this factual knowledge there is presumably also moral knowledge, knowledge of right and wrong. Whether or not conscience is indeed a source of knowledge, it is a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation. An exercise of this faculty results in an occurrent state of consciousness which is a state of conscience.
So life, consciousness, and conscience are all different. Panpsychism aside, something can be alive without being sentient, a unicellular organism, for example, and of course anything sentient is conscious. Now we are not merely sentient, but also conscious of this and that. Beyond this, we command a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation which is what conscience is.
It is clear that to be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. Plants and non-rational animals are living things but have no conscience. My cats, for example, are alive, and moreover they are conscious, but they cannot tell right from wrong. If they think at all, they do not think in moral categories. They do not evaluate their actions or omissions morally. They lack the capacity to do so. Humans have the capacity for moral discernment and evaluation, if not at birth, then later on, whether or not they exercise it, and whether or not their consciences have been well formed.
Now the soul is presumably the seat of conscience: it is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience, not in virtue of my having a body.* But then it would seem to follow that the soul of a man cannot be a mere life-principle. For it is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. The argument, then, is this:
1) Being alive and having a conscience are different properties. Therefore:
2) It is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience.
3) It is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience. Therefore:
4) The soul cannot be merely the life-principle of my body.
Possible Objection
At best, what you have shown is that the soul cannot be merely a life-principle. But what is to stop this principle from doing other jobs as well? However it is with non-rational animals, in a human being, the soul is not merely (i) a life-principle but also (ii) the locus of conscience, (iii) the subject of intentional states, and (iv) the free agent of one's actions.
In a later entry I will respond to the objection.
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*If there is post-mortem judgment, it will be the soul that will be is judged, and judged morally, not the body, which implies that the soul is the seat of conscience and free agency. "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his immortal body soul?"
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My Grunt Jobs
Furniture mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles; grave digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California; letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree planter in Oregon; taxi driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.
Five reasons to avoid blue-collar work: (1) The working stiff gets no respect; (2) the pay is often bad; (3) the work is boring; (4) working class types are often crude, ignorant, resentful, envious, and inimical to anyone who tries to improve himself; (5) the worker puts his body on the line, day in and day out, and often bears the marks: missing thumbs, hearing loss, etc.
Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the 'downtrodden,' have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us. That is buncombe pure and simple. There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.
But individuation is a task, not a given. Es ist nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. You have to work at it.
There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.
And then these types have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals. To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don't identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.
Tribal identity is pseudo-identity.
One response to “My Grunt Jobs”
2 responses to “A New Morning”